Three years later he left Thetford for good.

Staymaking was his trade. In 1757 he turned up in London as a journeyman staymaker and a year later in Dover. He then moved on to the small village of Sandwich on the coast, where he opened a shop of his own. There he met and married, in 1759, Mary Lambert, a maid in service to the local woollen draper’s wife. It was a short-lived marriage, for she died the next year. Two years later Paine abandoned staymaking and started a new career as exciseman, a customs official assigned to collect the internal duties levied on beverages, tobacco and other household items. For the next few years he was assigned to Lincolnshire. In 1765 he lost his job because he had stamped goods that he had not, in fact, examined. A one-year return to staymaking in the village of Diss in Norfolk was followed by some months teaching English in London and several more as tutor and itinerant preacher. Paine was reinstated in the Excise Service in 1768 and assigned to Lewes in Sussex, where he remained for the next six years.

Throughout these itinerant years Paine pursued a disciplined regimen of selfeducation. He bought books and scientific equipment from his meagre earnings and attended lectures whenever possible. Having settled down in Lewes at the age of thirtyone, he turned to politics, business and family. He became a regular at the White Hart social club where national and parish politics were the constant topics of conversation. Contemporaries later noted what a joy it was to hear young Tom Paine take on the town officers in debate after a few beers. It was a reputation that would haunt Paine all his life. In addition to politics and drink Paine devoted a good deal of the time left over from his official excise duties to a snuff, tobacco and grocery business. He had little head for business and the shop fared poorly. He also remarried in Lewes. His second wife was the daughter, ten years his junior, of the former owner of his shop. In April 1774 the business failed. The marriage did no better; he and his second wife were permanently separated.

There was one important and enduring achievement in those six years in Lewes, however. Paine found his first cause and he threw himself into it with the same zeal that he would later bring to the American and French revolutions. Excise officers throughout Britain were seeking higher salaries in the 1770s and in 1772 Paine drafted a pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, to make their case. He went so far as to spend a winter in London distributing copies to Members of Parliament. The cause failed, too, but Paine was in print, and his appetite for social reform had been whetted. The six months in London lost him his job in the excise service, however; he was dismissed in 1774 for having left his post.

Bankrupt, separated and jobless, Paine left Lewes in 1774 and headed for London. He had not done much with his life in his thirty-seven years. He had failed in business, in marriage and in vocation. America tempted him. It offered a fresh start far from the drudgery of collecting taxes or making ladies’ stays.